Journalism from London.

War Crimes and the British Establishment

When Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, went to the East London Mosque, to argue that there was nothing wrong with imposing Sharia law on British citizens I wondered whether radical Islam was allowing the more reactionary elements of the establishment to revert to type. Even in the law, you cannot discriminate against white-skinned women in Britain without running into trouble. But right-thinking, left-leaning multi-culturalists will applaud if you propose that misogynist laws should be imposed on brown-skinned women, and men can find a new and politically correct way of playing a very old game.

Perhaps I am being unfair; perhaps the silly man did not have the faintest idea who he was playing with. For his Lordship’s information, the mosque is a centre for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the most extreme of the sub-continent’s clerical fascist parties. It is, needless to add, somewhat unreconstructed on the issue of female emancipation. The Lord Chief was not alone in making the pilgrimage to Whitechapel. Prince Charles toured the mosque. Ken Livingstone and many others on the pseudo-left formed alliances with Jamaat supporters, while the Muslim Council of Britain has many Jamaatis on board. It is not only progressives who flirt with the party. Only the other day Boris Johnson was in the mosque paying his respects.Read the whole thing

Nick Cohen’s books are like the best Smiths songs; however depressing the content, the execution is so shimmering, so incandescent with indignation that the overall effect is transcendently uplifting
Julie Burchill, Prospect
Cohen is perhaps the most insightful, thought-provoking and entertaining political writer in Britain today, and comes from the honest tradition of English liberal thought that threads from John Milton to John Stuart Mill and George Orwell
Telegraph
‘Into the space vacated by the controversialist Christopher Hitchens we might recruit the sardonic, sceptical columnist Nick Cohen The Times
‘Writing with passion, wit and erudition, Cohen draws upon the spirit of Orwell and Milton in his call for a fightback against the onslaught on free speech’ Metro
‘You Can’t Read This Book. You can, OF COURSE. And you should. Cohen is right about everything that matters.’ Standpoint

'A roaring polemic of outrage against the moral and political crisis of the liberal tradition. It is already one of the most discussed current affairs books of the new year…At the very least it forces anyone on the left to think carefully about where their movement has ended up in the modern world.' The Guardian

‘Exceptional and necessary…Do not feel you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that it crucial for all of us, and for our time.’ Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times

‘This is a brave, honest and brilliant book. Every page has a provocative insight that makes you want to shake the author's hand or collar him for an argument. Who could ask for more?’ The Observer